Wednesday, February 05, 2014


Kansas Middle School: Poster Listing Sex Acts Part of 'Health and Science' Curriculum

The father of a 13 year-old girl who was upset by a classroom poster that listed sex acts was shocked to hear that the poster is part of her school’s health and science curriculum.

As local Fox News affiliate in Kansas, fox4kc.com, reported Tuesday, Mark Ellis said his daughter, a student at Hocker Grove Middle school in the Shawnee Mission School District, was “shocked” by what she saw on a poster on a classroom wall in school. Ellis said his daughter took a picture of the poster and showed her parents.

Originally, Ellis assumed the poster to be a student prank, until he called the school and discovered it was part of the curriculum.

“Why would you put it in front of 13 year-old students?” he asked.

The poster, entitled, “How Do People Express Their Sexual Feelings?” lists sex acts such as: Oral Sex, Sexual Fantasy, Caressing, Anal Sex, Dancing, Hugging, Touching Each Other’s Genitals, Kissing, Grinding, and Masturbation.

Ellis said after being told by the school principal the poster was “teaching material,” he is now concerned about what his daughter is being taught in school.

“It upsets me,” he said. “And again, it goes back to who approved this? You know this had to pass through enough hands that someone should have said, ‘Wait a minute, these are 13-year-old kids, we do not need to be this in-depth with this sexual education type of program.’”

According to Fox News, however, district spokeswoman Leigh Anne Neal said the poster must be viewed in the context of a bigger curriculum, which she identified as abstinence-based for students in middle school.

“The poster that you reference is actually part of our middle school health and science materials, and so it is a part of our district approved curriculum,” Neal said. “However the item is meant to be part of a lesson, and so certainly as a standalone poster without the context of a teacher led discussion, I could see that there might be some cause for concern.”

Neal added that the curriculum is similar to those used by other schools around the country.

“The curriculum it is a part of, it aligns with national standards around those topics, and it’s part of our curriculum in the school district,” she said.

In fact, the curriculum, titled “Making A Difference,” is published by selectmedia.org and recommended by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) as a “pregnancy prevention intervention.”

According to the publisher's website, the goal of the program is:

    "...to empower young adolescents to change their behavior in ways that will reduce their risk of pregnancy and HIV or other STD infection. Specifically, this curriculum emphasizes that young adolescents should postpone sexual activity and that practicing abstinence is the only way to eliminate the risk for pregnancy and STDs, including HIV."

Module 2 of the program, which is called “Understanding Adolescent Sexuality and Abstinence,” offers “an overview of reproductive anatomy, discusses messages about sex, discusses how people express themselves sexually [apparently reinforced by the poster], and the benefits of abstinence.”

According to HHS, in the original study that explored the effectiveness of the Making A Difference program, the participants were African-Americans, aged 11-13.

Nevertheless, Ellis thinks the curriculum should change.

“This has nothing to do with abstinence or sexual reproduction, actually, a lot of these things,” he said. “I would like to see that this particular portion of the curriculum is removed from the school.”

As Fox News reported, Ellis said if the curriculum doesn’t change, he will remove his daughter from sexual education classes.

SOURCE




Hair raising public school statists in Texas

 American Public education statists believe that they have a perfect right to compel by force all human beings between the ages of five and eighteen years to forfeit their precious time, liberty and constitutional rights for seven hours of collective confinement every weekday 280 days every year.

And while they’re at it, these same statists claim the right to force their school-aged victims to conform in all manner of behavior, dress, personal appearance and thought. The children are treated just like inmates in a state penitentiary; penalized for the slightest infractions. It is not enough that they are prisoners; they’re expected to conform like sheep.

Witness the sad case of straight-A student, Devin Gonzalez, a junior at Elysian Fields High School in Ark-La-Tex Texas. She was penalized with suspension because of her hair color. "I got sent home because my hair is red" she explains.

It had been that same color for more than a year, but now the statist administrators are forcing her to change it. They think it’s distracting and doesn’t meet the school dress code.

"I was allowed to come back Thursday because I attempted to dye my hair a different color, but it didn't work obviously," she said. So she was suspended again. The statist principal insists that student hair must be a natural color. "It can't be two-toned and it has to be a natural color.”

"I do volleyball, softball, I'm in FFA, OAP, I'm in one of the plays, I tutor little kids at the elementary on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I don't feel like I'm a trouble maker. I freak out when I get a B," she added. Now she’s hoping her new hair color won't cause any more trouble or stand in the way of her education again.

Yes, they’ve taught this poor little lamb well.  She’s meekly caving in to their criminal demands which violate her First Amendment right to freedom of expression as though she’s the trouble maker deserving punishment. She’s just another hapless victim of those hair raising public school statists in Texas.

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Full marks for Minister Gove’s state-school ambition

The decision not to let Baroness Morgan stay on for another term as chairman of Ofsted may not trouble many voters. Labour claims that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, decided against renewing her contract because he would prefer a Tory donor to a former confidant of Tony Blair. Mr Gove insists that he simply wanted a fresh face.

The controversy reopens the debate, as considered by Dan Hodges, about whether quango appointments are political and, if they indeed are, whether it would be more honest just to admit it. Throughout the Blair years, many people got jobs on the basis of their relationship to the government of the day. By contrast, the Tories have actually got by with only a little help from their friends. In 2011, 77 per cent of politically active quango appointees were Labour supporters – despite David Cameron being in Number 10.

Whatever the truth of who appoints whom and why, it is obvious that the political knives are out for Mr Gove. Labour, predictably, thinks it can tar him as an authoritarian ideologue. Interestingly, the Lib Dems think that they can gain votes by joining in. Their opinion research has revealed that they need to win back public sector workers if they are to stand a chance of holding onto their seats at the next election. It is not hard to infer that Nick Clegg’s attacks on Mr Gove, and David Laws’s outrage at the “politicisation” of Ofsted, are designed to woo teachers.

All of which brings us to the real issue: the resistance among the Left to Mr Gove’s programme of reforms. This week he lays out his plans to tackle the “bog standard” attitude in English state education. The evidence shows that under Labour, grades were inflated and standards slackened, with the effect that many schools were outperformed by those in developing countries. Mr Gove has tried to offer parents greater choice and improve teaching, with the effect that now 250,000 fewer pupils are in failing schools. We can expect a week of feverish discussion about his fresh ideas, including issuing new guidance on discipline in the classroom and Common Entrance exams designed to compare British performance with top institutions from around the world.

“My ambition for our education system is simple,” Mr Gove tells the London Academy of Excellence in a speech today. “When you visit a school in England, standards are so high all round that you should not be able to tell whether it’s in the state sector or a fee paying independent.” This is why his agenda for state schools so terrifies the Left. It represents a much-awaited rejection of bog-standard equality in favour of the excellence that typifies the independent ethos.

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